Solo

There can be little doubt of the form of midrash in the gospels but I am genuinely puzzled why Price, Doherty and others feel that the presence of obvious literary borrowings constitutes proof that the stories themselves are inventions having no historical background.

I am not sure what the parallel of JFK/TR is supposed to prove. First, the necessary midrashic impetus is missing, and second, we know that JFK lived and so, even if some incident of his life became mixed up with another man's it is of no great consequence. The events happened in the 20th century whose global information channels are wide and open. Certainly myths continue to be created even today by historians and politicos (e.g. it is commonly believed that Hitler personally ordered the Holocaust, which almost certainly was not the case), but an invention of a major historical figure (or modelling a mythical hero as one) is so hugely improbable that one wonders why one would want to offer it.

Now, I remember someone (I believe it was Michael Turton) saying upon the discovery of midrashic use by Mark's of Nehemiah 13, all but closed the possibility that there was a historical incident of Jesus throwing a temple tantrum, as Paula Fredriksen calls it. But does it ?

I tend to see the use of "midrash" in the interpretative sense: events that did happen, happened for a reason, as they were foretold, or as a significant parallels to established divinities which confirmed the nature of Jesus. Further, I suspect a species of "theological Korsakoff" syndrome deployed here. Christianity grew in an adopted environment markedly different from its origins, lingustically and likely sociologically. (Jesus roots would have been rustic, Christianity grew first in urban settings). The religion had tenuous (,if any,) ties to the original movement. Whatever historical sourcing existed at the outset was halted by the first Jewish war, or so it appears. The group believed the world was going to end abruptly in near future. In this situation, whatever events about Jesus were remembered would have been fragmentary and disconnected. Korsakoff's syndrome is a known condition in chronic alcoholics who tend to compensate the lack of memory by filling holes with confabulated material. I suspect the OT and literary borrowings were in part compensating for the loss of historical memory of Jesus.

There may be another strong impetus for using borrowed material even if the history was remembered. We know from Paul that being a Christian was not something one should feel ashamed of. So evidently some shaming of Christians was taking place; the Cross was a folly and an outrage. Some of the genuine historical material about Jesus would have been probably too controversial, i.e. not fit to scribble. Pieces of historical material about Jesus likely lie embedded in the texts but ended up overlaid by testimonials of autoscopic mental events, and confessions.
The temple ruckus looks like something that probably did happen. In the narrative sequence of the synoptics it is the event which directly led to Jesus' arrest. If Jesus was a small-time leader of low social standing but a searing ambition and vision, the Temple - as the centre of Jewish religious life - would have naturally been the place where he would have wanted to reveal himself to larger public. Mohammed's reform naturally tended to Mecca's praying glens. In our own time, the al-Utabi's attempted takeover of the Grand Mosque in 1979 and Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale's that of the Golden Temple in Armitsar in 1984 testify to this constant in a religious reformer's ambition - a claim to the religious heart of the faith.

There is an interesting incogruity beween Jesus displays of dominance in Jn 2:13-24 and a hasty retreat from the compound Jn 8:59 under a threat of stoning. Phantasy and reality ?

Jiri

gurugeorge

I think the idea is just that if an element is Midrash then the historicity is undecidable, but if enough of the story is Midrash then you've got less and less historicity to counterbalance the Midrash to be able to say that it's Midrash inspired by historical fact in the way you suggest. With most mythologisation you can say it's mythologisation because you've got some external evidence to show the mythologised person existed and/or didn't do those things. With Christ there's very little - there's enough to make it a possibility, but not enough so that it's the obvious choice, given the sheer weight of midrash/myth/theology/storytelling on the other side of the balance.

But you're right, there could be a little glimmer of heavily larded over fact in that incident, but ... damn, I recently read something about this but I can't remember who by. If I remember I'll post the URL. Basically, this guy said that the Temple incident is highly unlikely, given the way the Temple was structured, organised and policed, and the sheer size of it.

Aren't "Temple takeovers" usually armed things, with lots of "disciples" involved? Just going in and overturning tables and ranting with a few disciples in tow wouldn't have been anything near even a viable attempt at takeover - he'd've just been grabbed and clapped in prison immediately without even a bit of fuss, and the incident would hardly have been noticed in that vast, busy space, with several large areas.

gurugeorge

Yes, but what it may bespeak is a capacity of the mind/brain/body to experience similar things in similar circumstances (or analogous regimes of practice - for example, the functional similiarity of Hindu or Buddhist "mantra" and some kinds of Jewish chanting or prayer).

That takes the academic investigation of these things away from a purely scholarly study of texts, which may make you as a scholar uncomfortable, but it's still a proper study, and it's likely to give a better "bigger picture".

Understanding of how religious/mystical experience/understanding arises can then feedback into the scholarly study of texts by altering expectations of what people were actually talking about, and what they might have meant when they were talking about it.

For example to say that the "Buddha nature" of the Tathagatagharba doctrine of Buddhism is like the "Christ" isn't to posit a genetic relationship - nor is it to say that either was "really" talking about the other. It's to say (for example, something like) that a human being's mind that has lost its sense of separation from the world, lost its sense of separate self, will function in a certain way, and that functioning will give rise to certain structurally similar or analogous philosophical interpretations of what it itself is, in different cultures. That kind of thing.

The future of all this stuff is interdisciplinary really. The kind of interdisciplinary research that has made cognitive science move ahead in recent years is the sort of thing that needs to be applied to the study of religion and religious history (and indeed the fruits of cognitive science would be a part of that study too!)

Zeichman

Gurugeorge:
If you claim is limited to analogy, then citing proto-Gnosticism in Paul's sotierology is pretty irrelevant to the original claim. Besides, analogy has been used a bit since Smith published "Drudgery Divine" in 1990. My original claim of Pauline sotierology as distinct from sort of "gnostic" version of such in Marcion stands.

Solo

E.P Sanders provides a detailed description of the Temple organization in Judaism:Practice and Belief (or via: amazon.co.uk).

We do not know what happened in the temple. It's just that John 8:59 looks like an independent tradition describing an incident with Jesus fleeing from the temple. I can't imagine that as midrash. The overturning of tables and driving people out of the Temple sounds like a fantasy and a "filler" for an embarrassing expulsion from the compound. If anything like an attempt at armed takeover took place, Jesus would have had company of his own at his crucifixion. But some incident likely did take place: perhaps Jesus made a scene promising (or waiting for) a sign from heaven, threatening the destruction of the place if he was not heeded, then some beards got tugged and perhaps some stones were thrown. When a report of this minor incident was made Jesus might have been connected to other activities (like tampering with graves) identifying him as a dangerous charlatan. Repairing to Jerusalem from Galilee and getting into trouble, would have sufficed, says Geza Vermes, to raise suspicions of a rebellion in the making. We know from Philo that Pilate was known to execute prisoners without trial.

Jiri

gurugeorge

Not sure what you mean. It's not analogy in the sense of literary or critical analogy, it's analogy through connecting two things via a scientific view of biology, physiology, psychology, cognitive science. As I said, this steps outside where you might want to keep the discussion, but I don't think any sort of resolution will ever be found by staying merely within the texts and philological analysis. Even with the kind of scholarly work you are into, it presupposes a background of understanding of philosophy of the day, a bit of archaology, etc., etc.

What I'm saying is that if you make the background to the scholarly (linguistic, philological) investigation even more multidisciplinary, to take in the kinds of peculiar phenomena the brain just happens to produce under certain circumstances, the picture becomes even clearer: seeing Paul as proto-Gnostic makes sense of some of the passages in Paul, which makes sense of Marcion (who obviously develops Paul's proto-Gnosticism in his own way); it also makes it easier to see what's actually alien to Paul in the Epistles, makes it much more likely that what Tertullian claimed were excisions in Marcion are actually later additions, etc. It also makes sense of the claim of Valentinians that Paul was their grand-teacher, who developed Paul's proto-Gnosticism in a slightly different direction from Marcion.

e.g., what you look for and how you conceive it changes, the wider the panorama you have of the total situation.

Ted Hoffman

Then address the following which I have in my review of Sanders:

The Size of the Temple and The Size of the Crowd
One scholar who has doubted the authenticity of this temple incident is Paula Fredricksen who writes in From Jesus to Christ that she learnt quite a bit about the temple from Sanders book Judaism: Practice and Belief (1992) including the temple’s measurements which she describes as follows: “The total circumference of the outermost wall ran to almost 9/10ths of a mile; twelve soccer fields, including stands, could be fit in; when necessary (as during the pilgrimage festivals, especially Passover) it could accommodate as many as 400,000 worshipers.”
When Fredricksen visited the Temple Mount, she was aghast at how huge it was and its size shrank Jesus alleged action and prompted her to ask herself:

If Jesus had made such a gesture, how many would have seen it? Those in his retinue and those standing immediately around him. But how many, in the congestion and confusion of that holiday crowd, could have seen what was happening even, say, twenty feet away? Fifty feet? The effect of Jesus' gesture at eye-level would have been muffled, swallowed up by the sheer press of pilgrims. How worried, then, need the priests have been?

Needless to say, her confidence in the historicity of the temple scene diminished as she contemplated these questions and she states as much in the referenced article.

Jesus Would Have Been Arrested

But assuming, for argument’s sake, that Jesus’ action was as disruptive as portrayed in the gospels, the Roman soldiers would have arrested Jesus or forcefully restored order because, as Josephus intimates in Antiquities of the Jews 20.5.3 and Wars Of The Jews 2.12.1, the Romans always had soldiers on stand-by during Passover because riots were likely to ensue during Passover. The Roman administration also needed the taxes that the moneychangers and other traders paid and they would not watch idly as the temple activities were disrupted by a lone man.

Midrashic Composition

This is about identifying where the structure and the components of the temple ruckus were derived from. One scholar who has attempted to do this is Geoffrey Troughton who has identified the ‘intertextual echo’ between Mark 11:15-16 which states that Jesus ejected the moneychangers out of the temple, and Nehemiah 13:4-9, which states that Nehemiah ejected Tobiah from ‘the assembly of God’. Besides thematic similarities, Trougton also points out the linguistic links between the two passages. Troughton writes in Echoes in the Temple? Jesus, Nehemiah and their Actions in the Temple:

Perhaps the most vivid similarity between the actions of Jesus and Nehemiah is the overturning of the tables. Both actions involve a direct, physical interaction with the equipment that furnished the ‘foreign’ presence. In each case, violence is enacted against inanimate objects rather than directly against people...the prohibition against carriage through the Temple is the likeliest source of allusion to Nehemiah. Specifically,…the linguistic connection through common use of the term skeuoj (‘vessels’). In the gospel accounts, it appears that Jesus endeavored to disrupt the carriage of certain objects through the Temple... NRSV translates skeuoj as ‘anything’ (thus, ‘he wouldn’t allow anything to be carried’), but the word is more properly rendered ‘vessel’... Nehemiah was concerned about the ‘proper’ functioning of the Temple, including ensuring that the items necessary for proper worship were readily available. These included the ‘vessels’.

Although he doesn’t argue the point, the point that emerges from Troughton’s paper is that the author of Mark distinctly borrowed aspects of the temple cleansing incident from Nehemiah. This is a further argument against the historicity of the temple incident.

The Odds of a Lone Man Disrupting Activities in the Fortified Temple

As has been pointed out by George Wesley Buchanon in Symbolic Money-Changers in the Temple? (1991), the temple was the most fortified place in Jerusalem since it acted as the treasury and could even be used as a Fortress. As such, Jesus could not simply have walked in and thrown the moneychangers out as depicted in the gospels. Michael Turton explains in Historical Commentary of the Gospel of Mark:

The moneychangers undoubtedly had their own guards and servants, and so did the local priests. It is therefore unlikely that Jesus could have generated an incident there that was prolonged enough for anyone to notice. There were too many warm bodies to squelch it before it got rolling. A further problem, as Buchanon (1991) points out, is that the Temple was not merely the main religious institution of the Jewish religion; it was also the national treasury and its best fortress. The Temple's importance should not be underestimated: all three sides in the internal struggle during the Jewish War fought to gain control of the Temple. Not only is it highly unlikely that Jesus could have simply strolled in and gained control of the Temple, it is also highly unlikely that anyone would have permitted him to leave unmolested after such a performance.

The Odds of Traders Watching Idly as their Wares are Thrown

In Jesus' Temple Act Revisited: A Response to P. M. Casey (2000), David Seeley states some of the practical obstacles Jesus would have countenanced. For example, at least one of the moneychangers would have been angry at having his table overturned and wrestled with Jesus. It would have been next to impossible for an individual to prohibit hundreds of people from carrying vessels. And if his disciples helped out, that would have been tantamount to an insurrection which the Roman soldiers would have crushed brutally and Jesus would not have been crucified alone.

Lack of Independent Attestation - by Josephus, Paul etc

Further, Josephus mentions several messianic claimants and the prophecies they made. He never mentions Jesus making this incident that Sanders, as we have seen, identifies as a ‘prophetic threat’. An event of this magnitude, considering the thousands of witnesses that would have been present, and considering the extent to which it could have disrupted the trading activities, would not have missed Josephus’ radar. Even Paul does not mention it. This lack of attestation outside the gospels further argues against its historicity.

Ted Hoffman

Solo, do we expect a response to my post from you in the forseeable future?